It is our birthright as biological systems designed for self-replication, the baseline condition of our existence, at the macro level of the organism and the micro level of its cells.
But the self which we serve admits of vast variations occasioned by individual differences in capacities and temperaments and by societal differences in cultures, some acquired by birth, some acquired by choice.
Culture acquired by choice can be a renunciation of one’s culture by birth, accessories to it (as are the subcultures of occupation, profession, vocation or hobby interest), or adornments of it (as are the subcultures of dress and lingo, association and lifestyle).
Selves to be served also differ in the degree to which they are anchored in needs and desires that are asocial and atomistic, social and group-oriented, or idealistic, that is, expressing an allegiance to a code of conduct purer than any real society, a higher law.
One can think of this third, most abstract, ideological category as a self defined by a virtual community (e.g. the community of the saints, men of science, voices in the dialogue of thought). One can also think of this as a community of two, the moral agent and their ultimate all-seeing and all-knowing judge (whether that judge is conceived of as a personal God or as the judgment of History).
So, of these three most fundamental kinds of selves, the first is a selfin the individual context, the second in the social context and the third in a virtual social context.
In each case, self-determination, also known as freedom, would mean the subjection of the needs and desires of that self to no external force or authority (autonomy, in Kant’s terminology).
In the first case, we would call the person selfish.
In the second case we would call the person either fair-minded, just or righteous (accountable to more than their own self-interest) or socially conformist or opportunistically amoral, depending on our evaluation of the moral worth of the community to which it adheres.
In the third case we would call the person selfless, meaning that their ultimate loyalty is to a creed or code of ethics, above any real-world community, all of which are likely to be flawed.
Only the third case are fully realized moral agents in the strictest sense of the word, assuming, of course, the moral worth of the virtual community to which they aspire.
Presumably, everyone who sacrifices for either a real or virtual community assumes that that community has moral worth.
But real communities are inevitably flawed because they include many flawed moral agents and some defective ones — often in positions of authority, for authority and the consequent power over others draws ambitious souls.
Only virtual communities can be perfectly moral (think of them as composed of the all-stars of the league of moral agents).
But that is not to say that anyone claiming — or indeed, thinking — themselves to be perfectly moral is so. Fanatics assume their own infallibility, yet fanaticism comes from a weakness of character resulting in a need to dominate those around them.
The first case produces persons characterized by vices (bad actors, defective moral agents) and possibly even lawlessness (criminals).
The second case produces heroes, that is, persons willing to make sacrifices for their society, up to the ultimate sacrifice of life itself. Honored by all in their society, imitated by few.
The third case produces martyrs, that is, persons willing to sacrifice not only life itself, but also their social standing in their real-world community, even to the extreme of being mocked and derided as criminals. Some obvious examples of this are Jesus Christ and Alexei Navalny, alongside such fictional characters as Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or movies like Cool Hand Luke and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Hello, who is this?
What’s In Your Self?
The me I want to be?
The self is a fun-house hall of mirrors.
Every aspect of the self, each of the big three, and all of the subordinate facets, is its own mirror with its own distortions.
What’s in your self?
Which of these many mirrors reflects you as you really are, in all your complexity and your changeable moods, in the limitations of your present, the baggage of your past, and the dreams of your future?
And is the self you think you are the same as the self you really are? Is it the same as the one you appear to be to others, friends and enemies, intimates and strangers, the perceptive and the oblivious?
And, if you have a God, does your God — who alone sees into the hearts of men — see you as you would wish Him to? or does he see through a whited sepulcher to the corruption inside? or maybe just to a boastful, harmless phoney, a pretend do-gooder, faking it until they make it, but never quite making it, salvageable after a stint in Purgatory.
Alternatively, taking the secular perspective, does your image of yourself — the star of the show in your own inner moral telenovela— play a real and constructive role in the world at large? Or are you in a siloed theater, you and your tribe, playing to the home crowd but no closer to a goal than when the play started, and no more in search of a common ground with the fellow citizens sharing your Constitution than are your bitterest political foes?
And sectarian red voters are doing the same thing, while thinking of themselves as marching in the vanguard of God’s earthly army, which just may be a contradiction in terms — if Jesus is the model of God meant for imitation by man.
For what weak mortal vessel has the presumption to model himself on God the Avenger, a God full of wrath, looking down scornfully on lesser beings, the smiter of the Old Testament? (And how very attractive to a certain turn of mind!)
For those who march in the Vanguard, whether millenarian Christians or loyal cadres of the Communist Party, see themselves as so immersed in a life-and-death struggle of Good against Evil that none of the usual rules apply to them.
All is permitted in a cause so absolutely just. None of the constraints and compromises of little r republican government — with its tedious separation of powers, its painfully slow consensual procedures for establishing facts and vote count and verdicts, its universal franchise and one-man one-vote districting — none of that can be allowed to slow them in their righteous advance toward goals that leave no room for any other authority, any other voice!
Extremists and fanatics are the enemies of republics — which live by compromise between distinct parts permitted to flourish as best they can, each in their own way, and by the shared constitutional consensus that holds them together as a nation and a people.
In our time, the ultimate alternative to fractious but stable and united republics, and federations of republics (like NATO and the EU), are tyrannies of the nationalist Russian type, the Communist Chinese type, or the theocratic Iranian type.
Whatever kind of self you decide yourself to be, which of these delightful paradises would like like to park that self in?
And what, fellow citizen and voter, do you intend to do about it?
When All Is Said and Dunn 